MLB 15 The Show All-Star Packs: 5 Things to Know

New MLB 15 The Show All-Star packs have been released, and here are five things you need to know about the new packs before you buy them.

For those not familiar with baseball card packs in MLB 15 The Show, there’s a game mode called Diamond Dynasty that lets you create a team and fill the roster with real players by collecting their respective baseball card. You can earn baseball cards by simply playing MLB 15 The Show or buy cards using Stubs, which is the in-game currency used.

There are different levels of players (a.k.a. baseball cards) that you can obtain. There are Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond baseball cards, as well as just regular cards for lesser-known players that are easy and cheap to come by. Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond cards are designated for better players and are a bit more expense with each new level, meaning that Bronze cards are cheaper (but designated for mediocre players) and Diamond players are the most expensive and are meant for all-star caliber players, like Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout.

Read: MLB 15 The Show Release: 5 Things You Need to Know Now

You can buy individual baseball cards in the community marketplace, but prices fluctuate constantly, and the better players are more expensive, requiring a lot of Stubs. However, this where buying packs can help out.  Standard packs cost 1,00o stubs per pack and give you six player cards, which can hopefully result in a higher-level player like a Silver, Gold, or Diamond if you have good luck.

Every now and then, though, MLB 15 The Show will release special packs for a limited time, and this time around they’ve released All-Star packs ahead of next week’s MLB All-Star game. Here are give things you should know before buying them.

All-Star Pack Selection

There are four new packs to choose from with these All-Star packs: National League All-Stars, American League All-Stars, All-Stars (which are likely just a mix between NL and AL), and Ultimate All-Stars

With the National and American League All-Star packs, you get three player cards, with one of them being a guaranteed Gold card or higher, as well as a 25x higher chance for a Diamond card. With the regular All-Star pack, you get three player cards, two of which will be guaranteed Gold cards or higher, and a 100x higher chance of getting a Diamond card.

Finally, the Ultimate All-Stars pack will also come with three player cards, with one guaranteed Diamond card and a one guaranteed Gold card.

All-Star Pack Prices

As expected, be prepared to pay a pretty penny for these new All-Star packs, as they’re much more expensive than standard packs.

National and American League All-Star packs are priced at 15,000 Stubs each. The mixed All-Star packs are priced at 40,000 Stubs each, and the Ultimate All-Star packs cost 50,000 Stubs each.

The mixed All-Star packs look to be your best bet, although for just 10,000 more Stubs you can get a guaranteed Diamond player. Of course, though, 15,000 Stubs for the National and American League All-Star packs is a pretty good deal as well, with a guaranteed Gold card and a better chance at snagging a Diamond card.

All-Star Pack Availability

These new All-Star packs launch today, but it’s unknown as far as long they’ll be available for. Other limited-time packs released in the past were only available for a few days, so that could be the case this time around as well.

However, we wouldn’t be surprised to see these All-Star packs last longer than the weekend and into the All-Star game, which takes place on Tuesday. This should give gamers plenty of time to check out the new packs and buy a few if they want.

Selling Individual Cards

Something that many gamers like to do in MLB The Show is to buy packs and try to flip any good cards they get in order to get their money back, especially if they have doubles of one card. However, this might be a bit difficult with these new All-Star packs.

Diamond players usually sell for a lot of Stubs, but with the availability of them skyrocketing with these new All-Star packs, prices will most likely drop for Diamond players in the community marketplace, which can be bad news for sellers.

If you can, try to sell any unwanted Diamond players as soon as possible to get as many Stubs for them as you can before the marketplace eventually crashes and prices plummet.

Buying Individual Cards

The good news for buyers is that you’ll probably be able to buy individual Diamond players cheaper than ever. Players like Miguel Cabrera are already around 35,000 Stubs, and it used to be around 50,000 Stubs. That price should keep falling the longer the packs are out.

Other players like Buster Posey are now selling for 17,000 Stubs at the time of this writing, whereas he used to sell for over 20,000. Andrew McCutchen also took a huge dive.

In other words, it’s going to be a huge buyer’s market, so if you have a lot of Stubs saved up, it might actually be a better idea to buy individual cards of players you need, rather than to spend a lot of spends and risk not getting the cards/players you want.